Interestingly, these kinds of insights into how light around us really works are still flying under the radar of modern digital photography.

In Fujifilm online communities ‘film simulation’ is peaking at this moment. Thing with Fuji cameras is, you can tweak many settings in-camera, including built-in simulations for the film look, white balance color shifts, and more. When you take a photo, camera applies these tweaks on the fly, resulting in a photo that does not need much extra post-processing.

For the past 2-3 years this got viral on socials, with the influx of new Fuji owners, and the exponential rise of "film recipes" - set of settings that lead to a specific photo look. The interesting part is, in most cases people share example photos that are taken in vastly different geographies.

What gets lost is that a recipe is mostly just a fixed color shift: more blue or yellow, more red or cyan, plus a tone curve on top of a film sim. That’s it. Many popular recipes are one or two notches apart from each other. The dramatic differences people see in the example photos come from the light where those photos were taken, not from the settings.

And light is far more complex than most of us think we understand. As the post shows, direct sun gets yellower the more atmosphere it passes through, so it changes with latitude, season and time of day. Shadows, meanwhile, are lit by blue skylight. So one photo already contains light of different colors, and a single fixed shift can’t correct all of them the same way. The "Wes Anderson" recipe that looks great in California turns yellow and muted in Finland.

People blame the settings, or even buy another recipe, when the thing they’re actually trying to copy is the sun and atmospheric scatter.